Natural gas transporter eyes new pipeline through Southern Tier

Project would connect Pa. to New England markets

Feb. 20, 2012

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The country's top transporter of natural gas is eyeing a corridor cutting across the Southern Tier for the path of a major new transmission pipeline.

Houston-based El Paso Corp., the owner of the nation's largest natural gas transmission system, is proposing to add a north-south pipeline to its continent-spanning web that will funnel natural gas produced in northeastern Pennsylvania to markets in New England.

"El Paso Corp. is evaluating the need for additional infrastructure in the region," company spokesman Richard Wheatley said. "We're evaluating a pipeline that would move gas supplies from northeastern Pennsylvania to a pipeline interconnection near Albany, New York."

Plans are in their early stages, he said, and the targeted in-service date of the as-yet-unnamed pipeline is late 2014.

The project would fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as well as state regulators in Pennsylvania and New York, and no official documents have been filed with those agencies.

"We haven't even formalized a route yet," Wheatley said

While the prospective natural gas artery is intended to siphon energy from Pennsylvania's natural gas fields, landowners in New York see the proposed pipeline as a positive development.

The pipeline could make surrounding land more attractive to energy companies, said Dan Fitzsimmons, president of the Joint Landowners Coalition of New York.

"One thing it does do is give us more infrastructure to get our gas to market," he said. "As the gas moves forward there will need to be more infrastructure, and that's what this proposed line would actually do."

As landmen begin to meet with property owners about land rights needed to build the pipeline, Fitzsimmons and others are urging landowners to speak with an attorney and local coalition leaders before considering an agreement.

"They're looking to start locking up landowner easements, so we're looking to start to have some landowner informational meetings to get word out," said Jim Worden, a leader of the Windsor & Colesville Oil and Gas Lease Coalition.

Even for those on the ground, detailed information on the new pipeline is hard to come by.

"I do know it's going to be a major transmission line," Worden said.

Citing a brochure purportedly being circulated to landowners in the Southern Tier, pro-drilling blogger Andy Leahy has written that the prospective pipeline would be 36 inches in diameter with a volume of 650,000 dekatherms per day, and follow a 114.3-mile path through Susquehanna County in Pennsylvania and Broome, Delaware and Schoharie counties in New York.

Those figures would give the proposed pipeline a larger capacity than the Millennium Pipeline, a major east-west gas transmission channel bisecting Broome, Tioga and other counties in the Southern Tier.

Wheatley declined to confirm any of these details.

El Paso's operations in the Northeast include the Tennessee Pipeline, a key conduit running through heavily drilled pockets of northern Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale territory, including Bradford and Susquehanna counties.

Late last year, Houston-based Kinder Morgan, Inc., agreed to buy El Paso Corp. for $21.1 billion, consolidating two of the nation's largest energy transmission corporations.